Childhood cancer survival grew during the last decades. Consequently, there is an increasing number of adults requiring appropriate follow-up care due to possible late effects of treatments many years after cancer cure. Purpose: This study contributes to the ongoing discussion about the design and delivery of care to long-term childhood cancer survivors, by evaluating their number, features and age distribution in Italian areas covered by cancer registration.

METHODS

We computed 15-year Limited Duration Prevalence by applying the SEER*Stat software on data from 15 Italian populationbased cancer registries (covering 19% of population) and estimated complete prevalence of people living after surviving childhood cancer (age 0-14), by using the CHILDPREV method [1], implemented in ComPrev.

RESULTS

Over 44,000 persons in Italy were estimated alive at January 1st, 2010 after a cancer diagnosed during childhood. This number corresponds to 73 per 100,000 and to 2% of prevalent cases diagnosed at any age. Males were 54% and 64% survived after being diagnosed before 1995, the start of the observation period. A quarter of all cases were diagnosed with brain and CNS tumors, a quarter with acute lymphoid leukemia, and 7% with Hodgkin lymphoma. Nearly a quarter of prevalent patients were aged 40 years and older in 2010. Use of the software ComPrev will be illustrated in details.

CONCLUSION/DISCUSSION

A method to estimate prevalence of people diagnosed with cancer in their childhood, based on observed prevalence as well as on modeling of survival and incidence through the completeness index, is proposed. Information about the number of people living after a childhood cancer by cancer type and their specific health-care needs may be helpful to health-care planners and clinicians in the development of guidelines aimed to manage the burden of late effect of treatments.